Trepn™ Profiler is a great tool for our developers to use in analyzing their apps, and we are pleased to now make it available to a wider audience by releasing it in Google Play. This allows anyone with Google Play to download and install the Trepn Profiler application with only two taps. After installing Trepn Profiler 6.0, you’ll notice a big difference right away as the old black and white interface has been replaced with a colorful new modern interface that was inspired by Android 5.0. In addition, there is a new time-saving preset-driven home screen. With 6.0, a single touch selects all of the necessary data points, configures overlays, and picks the optimum view for each preset. The previous version of Trepn could take up to a minute to set up the software to display the load on four processor cores. With 6.0, a single tap on ‘CPU Load Overlay’ does this for you. You can switch to show all processor frequencies in about 2-3 seconds, which can be a big time saver.

I recently spent time with bloggers from all over the world, and was surprised to find how many used Trepn Profiler. Most of them used it to monitor the processor frequency as different benchmarks were run to see how long the cores stayed at their maximum operating frequency. It is interesting to see the differences between processors from different manufacturers. For example, the cores on an Exynos-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab S tend to stay the same frequency, and almost never drop to zero. Whereas the custom cores on a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™-powered Nexus 7 operate independently – adjusting their frequency to meet the demand. When the load is light, their frequency drops to zero as you can see on the right. This saves power and lowers the processor’s temperature, so throttling is less likely to occur.

By selecting the ‘Network Activity’ preset, you can view the status of all the radios in your phone (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular). This is important because some apps leave the cellular radio in a high power transmission state too long, which wastes power and affects battery life. Trepn Profiler can also show which of the seven states your cellular radio is in, and is one of a few apps that can show exactly how much power your mobile device is using at any given time. This is not an estimate of the remaining battery, but rather it reads power directly from the power management IC in supported mobile devices. Developers love this feature, as well as the ability to display per-rail power deltas on hardware like the Snapdragon 810 MDP tablet from Intrinsyc. It shows the power consumed by the CPU Cores 1-4, CPU Cores 5-8, GPU, LCD backlight, front camera, rear camera, system memory (RAM), internal memory/SD card, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, sensors and USB.

The ‘Performance Graph’ preset can also show whether your device is CPU or GPU constrained. Other presets show which apps are hogging your CPU and wasting mobile data. There is also an ‘Advanced’ mode available for users who want to save the data from a profiling session in a database or CSV file so it can be analyzed later.